MediumIt's difficult to separate yourself as a writer. Your Instagram friends will cross the world and shoot infinite exotic and beautiful locations. You will lock yourself in a room, pushing buttons to try and express how you feel. The latter is not a natural thing.
So, as you attempt to use the same 26 letters everyone else uses to make the same vocabulary words everyone else uses so you can post them on platforms everyone else uses, keep this in mind:
You are in for a battle.READ MORE

Scientific AmericanIn a viral YouTube video from October 2011 a 1-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad's touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes against her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine — or so a title card would have us believe.READ MORE

The New YorkerSeveral years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn't really like the idea of being given a reading "prescription." I've generally preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf's passionate commitment to serendipity in my personal reading discoveries.READ MORE

The MillionsIt's easy to buy into the classic image of the isolated female author: the eccentric Brontë sisters, wandering the moors; lofty George Eliot, sequestered in her London villa; a melancholic Virginia Woolf, loading her pockets with stones before stepping into the River Ouse. Male writers, on the other hand, often come in pairs: Fitzgerald and Hemingway on their riotous drinking sprees, Wordsworth and Coleridge hiking together through the Lakeland hills, Byron and Shelley encouraging each other's sexual escapades.READ MORE

American Press InstituteFor newsrooms, the social media tumult began a decade ago.
In 2008, journalists new to digital media in legacy print newsrooms were trying to adapt to a Twitter invention called the hashtag. Facebook was confounding them, and MySpace was dying just when some were beginning to understand it.
Then came the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, largely chronicled on social media. An American student was rescued from jail with a one-word tweet.READ MORE

The GuardianJournalists working for Facebook say the social media site's fact-checking tools have largely failed and that the company has exploited their labor for a PR campaign.
Several fact checkers who work for independent news organizations and partner with Facebook told the Guardian that they feared their relationships with the technology corporation, some of which are paid, have created a conflict of interest.READ MORE

CNBCConsumers were even more optimistic in October than economists polled by Reuters expected.
Consumer confidence rose to 125.9 in October, according to the Conference Board.
The index "increased to its highest level in almost 17 years," Lynn Franco, Director of Economic Indicators at The Conference Board, said in a statement. That was in December 2000, when the index hit 128.6. READ MORE

Nieman LabNational Observer is no stranger to successful crowdfunding campaigns. The Canadian investigative news outlet launched its first Kickstarter in 2014, raising 53,040 Canadian dollars (USD $41,615) from 741 backers to produce 140 stories on the conflicts associated with Canada's tar sands. That was followed by a 2015 campaign that raised CA $80,939 from 574 backers to report on climate change solutions and a successful 2016 campaign that raised CA $70,863 from 784 backers.READ MORE

Editor & PublisherWith the closure of alternative weeklies in Baltimore and Philadelphia — and the Village Voice's decision to end print publication after 62 years — the past few years have been grim for the once-essential element of the urban media landscape. But like other newspaper publications, alt weeklies around the country are finding new ways to be profitable, including nonprofit funding, specialty publications and new advertising markets.READ MORE

Yale Environment 360The billowing stainless steel forms of Frank Gehry's Pritzker bandshell seem to float up from behind the 3.5-acre Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, backed by Chicago's celebrated skyline. Another landmark in a city long a laboratory for innovation in architecture and landscaping, the garden has been called a "model of responsible horticulture." Masses of flowering perennials and grasses are a striking counterpoint to the surrounding walls of concrete and glass. READ MORE

The New York TimesThere are 422 living trees for every human on Earth — 3.04 trillion overall — and during a couple of weeks each fall, a person can feel plainly outnumbered. Is it possible that a trillion of those trees have deposited their leaves in the front yard? And why are so many of them still green?
That global tree census comes from a 2015 study in the journal Nature. READ MORE

Greenhouse GrowerEach year, Greenhouse Grower asks field trial managers across the country to share their results with us, including how weather affected their trials, new ideas they tried, and the varieties that made their top performer, best of show and consumer favorite lists.
This year, wild swings in weather, from heat waves and unseasonably cool weather to gale-force winds and pounding rains, kept field trial managers on their toes, but overall most of the sites came through just fine.READ MORE